Methods

While there is no guarantee of success in innovation, by institutionalizing leading and well-designed innovation processes, your team’s odds of producing successful innovations will improve. Teams with exposure to and adoption of tried-and-true training, tools and techniques operate more effectively and efficiently, which makes it possible for them to innovate rapidly and repeatedly.

Innovation Tools That Reduce Risk:

Idea generation techniques

Innovation process design

Methods for gaining customer and market insights

Hypothesis creation & testing

Rapid decision making

NewBoCo’s Innovation program is constantly working to identify the most proven processes to help Eastern Iowa companies thrive. No matter where you are on your innovation journey, you can always learn new methods to improve a process or launch a new product.

Process and Methods

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” - W. Edwards Deming

Meet Our Team

David Tominsky,
Accelerator Managing Director

David Tominsky has served as the Managing Director for the ISA since 2016. The 2016 ISA Cohort included six early-stage businesses. 100% of the teams are from Iowa and 50% of the teams are woman-led companies. In 2017, ISA plans to invest in 10 new companies and deploy $500,000 in capital. He served as the first Program Manager for the ISA from 2014-2015, where he helped build the program that brought 19 early-stage tech startups to Cedar Rapids in its first two years.

Mandy Webber
Director of Innovation, CSM & CSPO

Mandy Webber has more than 12 years of experience in marketing, business development, and corporate innovation. She has worked at organizations ranging in size from smaller Chicago construction companies to a large global corporation, Transamerica. As an innovation enthusiast, Mandy enjoys training, facilitating, and injecting passion in all things innovation, employee engagement, customer centricity, and workplace culture.

Mandy joined NewBoCo in March 2017 and has led the launch of a corporate innovation program to support existing organizations develop a culture that fuels innovation by embracing experimentation and rapid iteration. Mandy has many innovation and agile certifications including: Edward DeBono 6 Thinking Hats, Innovation Games Black Belt, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO).

Eric Engelmann
Executive Director, CSM & CSPO

Eric has been an eager adopter of Agile since 2008. First introducing the principles to the software team at his company, Geonetric, he expanded it fully across the company in 2013 – including HR, marketing and sales teams. This change built upon the self-organizing nature of Agile teams, and eventually resulted in having no traditional management at all. The company’s 80+ employees have developed tools and methods to work both autonomously and together, resulting in a strong culture that drives continued rapid growth, higher net income, very high client satisfaction rates, and strong employee retention.

After leaving Geonetric, Eric founded NewBoCo, with the intent to accelerate world-changing ideas, from Iowa. The nonprofit has built a local practice focused on adopting Agile in Iowa, but also has a strong network of the best Agile thought leaders in the world.

Eric is a Board Member at Scrum Alliance, the largest, most established and influential professional membership and certification organization in the Agile community.